Welcome to Hyperion Records, an independent British classical label devoted to presenting high-quality recordings of music of all styles and from all periods from the twelfth century to the twenty-first.

Hyperion offers both CDs, and downloads in a number of formats. The site is also available in several languages.

Please use the dropdown buttons to set your preferred options, or use the checkbox to accept the defaults.

Don't show me this message again

Meeres Stille, D216

Introduction

This is a marvel of impressionistic calm. The sea is motionless but we are also aware of the sinister implications of a becalmed voyage before the era of steam power. A tensely wrought melodic line is underpinned by breathless modulations - the arpeggii in the piano part convey stillness and fear at the same time. The song is only one page long but it somehow suspends time and place: the horizons are endless, the ship is cradled in dark waters, the piano part seems to measure the sea's depth, its chords vibrating like a sounding with line and lead. Above the vocal line there is no trace of wind in the sails. Fischer-Dieskau has written that 'the score of the song looks like a drawing' and indeed here is a map of motionless semibreves and the undulating lines denoting arpeggii seem nautically illustrative. The only undercurrent is one of human apprehension at the void created by Nature who has withdrawn her cooperation.

Goethe's poem dates from 1787 when, during his Italian journey, he voyaged from Naples to Sicily, and encountered all weathers. Schubert never even saw the sea - Austrian lakes were as near as he got. Beethoven also set the poem (chorally with orchestra} at more or less the same time, linking it with a happy ending - a setting of the pendant poem, Glückliche Fahrt (Prosperous Voyage). Schubert preferred to leave the ship at sea, captured for ever and set under glass on the waters' depths.

Recordings

Florian Boesch and Roger Vignoles were shortlisted for a BBC Music Magazine award for their first Hyperion album, ‘Loewe Songs and Ballads’. Boesch’s warm, sensuously attractive baritone voice, first-rate diction and remarkable acting ability were ...» More

'This would have been a massive project for even the biggest international label, but from a small independent … it is a miracle. An ideal Christ ...'Please give me the complete Hyperion Schubert songs set – all 40 discs –and, in the next life, I promise I'll "re-gift" it to Schubert himself … ...» More

Profound calm reigns over the waters,
the sea lies motionless;
anxiously the sailor beholds
the glassy surface all around.
No breeze from any quarter!
A fearful, deathly calm!
In the vast expanse
no wave stirs.

In the midst of his first, rapturous encounter with the poetry of Goethe, the eighteen-year-old Schubert set two versions of Meeres Stille on successive days in June 1815. The poem (paired by Goethe with Glückliche Fahrt—‘Prosperous Voyage’) was inspired by the eerie calm at the start of a voyage from Naples to Sicily in 1787; and in his second setting Schubert—who never saw the sea—responds with a miniature tone poem of impressionistic subtlety.

Profound calm reigns over the waters,
the sea lies motionless;
anxiously the sailor beholds
the glassy surface all around.
No breeze from any quarter!
A fearful, deathly calm!
In the vast expanse
no wave stirs.